AliciaDecker

Biography:

Alicia C. Decker earned her Ph.D. in Women's Studies from Emory University. She also has a master's degree in Gender Studies from Makerere University in Uganda and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching interests include gender and militarism, African women’s history, and global feminisms. She is the author of In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Ohio University Press, 2014), and co-author with Andrea Arrington of Africanizing Democracies: 1980 to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her scholarly articles have appeared in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Women’s History Review, Journal of Eastern African Studies, History Teacher, and Afriche e Orienti, as well as various edited book collections. She has been invited to present her research at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia), the University of Zadar (Croatia), the Bellagio Center (Italy), the University of Bologna (Italy), the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), Makerere University (Uganda), and the University of Roskilde (Denmark), as well as numerous universities and conferences throughout the United States.

Decker is currently working on a new book titled Public Secrets: A Gendered History of Enforced Disappearance in Post-Colonial Uganda. Using transcripts and reports from various commissions of inquiry, as well as other types of archival and ethnographic data, she is analyzing how gender influences patterns and experiences of forcible abduction by the state. Decker is looking at enforced disappearance, and other forms of political violence, as gendered scripts that are enacted by the state in order to maintain a certain performance of power. She is particularly interested in the ways in which various communities “read” these scripts, and how they engage with such knowledge, across space and time.